Even Oscar Wilde, socialist and anarchist that he was, would likely bristle at the radical dysfunction of American politics today. Wilde famously preferred “everything in moderation, including moderation.” But 2018 may be the year that lawmakers and voters alike crystallize their preference for a slight spin on the playwright’s words: a Congress in which nothing is in moderation, except for moderation.

This shift has been some time coming. In the last midterm elections, in 2014, only about 4 percent of congressional candidates were ideologically moderate, according to data compiled by Danielle Thomsen, a political-science professor at UC Irvine, who categorized candidates by their campaign donors. The proportion of moderates on the campaign trail “has been steadily declining since the 1980s,” Thomsen told me. “It takes a lot of guts to run for Congress as a moderate in the current environment.”

This is not only because campaigns tend to favor personalities over policy goals and apocalyptic rhetoric over good-faith debate. It’s also because Congress itself disincentivizes reaching across the aisle. Work with a Democrat? Bid your perfect Heritage Action Scorecard farewell. Consider a GOP judicial nominee? Hope you weren’t too attached to that committee gavel.

It’s worth exploring, then, how moderate candidates today—however few they may be—manage to survive, and how they're pitching themselves in the final days of their midterm campaigns. The candidates and political strategists I've spoken with believe that constituencies that value compromise still exist, as well as voters who feel invested in issues rather than parties. Candidates have tailored their campaigns accordingly, focusing on local issues, largely uncontroversial national topics such as infrastructure, and as little talk of Donald Trump as possible. Call it the moderate playbook, whose fate in November could signal a new hope for bipartisanship—or affirm its extinction.

Harley Rouda is betting on that playbook to unseat a 28-year House incumbent. In Orange County, California, Rouda is challenging Dana Rohrabacher, the Kremlin-friendly Republican who’s been steadfast in his support for President Trump.

A liberal fantasy, Rouda is not. He’s a 56-year-old real-estate executive who donated to John Kasich’s presidential campaign and would rather not indulge in talk of impeachment.

He didn’t register as a Democrat until after the 2016 election; he’d been an Independent since 1997 and was a Republican before that.

He’s not the ideal conservative, either; he supports Medicare for all and free college tuition. But he’s still trying to attract conservatives to his campaign, which touts endorsements from local longtime Republicans. In one ad, a man wearing a palm-tree-emblazoned shirt lauds Rouda as “someone who can play to the middle, and bring us together.” It’s not unusual to see Republicans for Harley signs across Newport Beach and Balboa Island.

Rouda often refers to himself as “pro-business” and “pro-economy,” which have long been handy catchall descriptors for anything from regulatory relief to tax reform. It’s a smart move, one Democratic strategist told me, especially in Orange County, where pricey real estate and yacht-club-goers abound. “I have candidates create a list of what makes them different from a national Democrat,” said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of current involvement in midterm campaigns. “Often it’s that they served in the military or they run a business. That’s where a moderate campaign starts.”

Differentiating oneself from the national party is especially crucial in 2018, the source said, when candidates such as the self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dominate media coverage of the left. “The key is to be able to tell voters what you’re not,” the strategist said. “If you can’t find the few specific things to separate yourself, you’re starting from a real deficit.”

So voters won’t see a candidate like Rouda, for example, hypothesizing about Russian collusion or debating the merits of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Instead, he’ll lament that two years into Trump’s presidency, no infrastructure package has reached the floor. “We’ve had Infrastructure Week every week for 50 weeks,” Rouda told me in a recent phone interview. In his view, this is an example of how “continued partisan bickering and extremism” can prevent even an issue with “great bipartisan support” from moving forward.

When we talked, Rouda was careful to tie his discussion of any issue back to his district. This seems like a small point, but as campaigns continue to drift away from the Tip O’Neill–favored dictum that all politics is local, it may be crucial for Rouda as a moderate. When the candidate talked about health care, he talked about how his opponent had voted multiple times to eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions, which he said affected 300,000 people under the age of 65 in his district. When he talked about the environment, he talked about the need to contain the jet noise and pollution from John Wayne Airport, in Santa Ana.

The challenges on the campaign trail are steep for House and Senate hopefuls alike. The race for Senator Bob Corker’s seat in Tennessee lays this bare. Like Rouda, Democrat Phil Bredesen is adhering to the moderate playbook in the hopes of besting an ardently pro-Trump Republican. Bredesen, a popular former governor of the state, is challenging Representative Marsha Blackburn. John Tanner, a former Tennessee congressman who founded the Blue Dog Coalition—a group of the House’s most conservative Democrats—told me that Bredesen is the Platonic ideal of a moderate: “financially responsible and socially tolerant.” Blackburn, for her part, blends her views entirely with Trump’s. When the president held a rally for her in Nashville earlier this year, she focused her entire speech on supporting his agenda.

Tanner, who retired from Congress in 2010, said the race’s close polling gives him hope that voters do want a return to the middle. “But oftentimes they aren’t presented with that model,” he said.

Bredesen may be the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, whose press office has flooded my inbox with statements about the ballooning federal deficit, offering a plan (in all caps) to balance the budget within six years. Federal borrowing was once conservatives’ cause célèbre. But by the time Republicans shuttled through a massive tax-cut package late last year, even amid projections of a huge spike in the deficit, the issue seemed to have lost its appeal. Nevertheless, as with infrastructure, it remains a topic unlikely to draw partisan ire one way or the other—making it a valuable talking point for a candidate like Bredesen.

These issues are what candidates like Bredesen talk about instead of talking about Trump. Bredesen has largely avoided national media—he declined to be interviewed for this story—and thus the news of the day. One notable exception was Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination: Bredesen ultimately sided with his party’s lone yea, fellow moderate Joe Manchin, who’s facing a tough reelection in West Virginia. "If the FBI report had something in it which was much more strongly corroborative of [Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault], I think that would be a different issue," Bredesen told local media. "But it didn't, and of course I didn't get a chance to see what was in it."

Voters are more likely to hear Bredesen urgently discussing Asian carp. The fish has invaded much of West Tennessee, starving out native species, and this has hit the state’s commercial-fishing industry hard. This summer, Bredesen announced his agenda to curb the population. His campaign, according to a spokeswoman, has sold “hundreds” of hats that say Cut the carp.

Much like noise pollution from John Wayne Airport, Asian carp hardly matches the current tabloidlike nature of national politics. But as Tanner put it, “That’s a proper role for a legislator, in a campaign. You’re not running against Trump; you’re running for the Senate.”

A handful of incumbents in both chambers and parties have also pitched themselves as moderates in the 2018 midterm cycle. Democratic Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Manchin come to mind, as well as Republican Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Will Hurd, and Dave Joyce. But Rouda and Bredesen are not moderate incumbents desperately trying to stay afloat; they’re first-time candidates for Congress. Both men decided that even in this hyper-partisan moment, the moderate playbook was worth the gamble.

Yet Rouda and Bredesen are something like unicorns in the 2018 cycle. There are so few other moderate first-time candidates out there, underscoring just how hard it is to persuade a middle-of-the-road-minded person to run for elected office.

“It’s just gotten so contentious,” former Illinois Republican Representative Bob Dold, a moderate who lost his seat in 2016, told me. “You’re getting millions of dollars being spent against you on negative ads, and most of them aren’t even true. A lot of people will just say, ‘No, thank you,’ to that.”

The Democratic strategist Peter Cari told me that both parties are struggling to convince would-be moderate candidates of a viable path to victory. “When the right thinks anyone who votes for compromise is a sellout, and Democrats think the same thing, it makes it tough to want to run,” he said. “Everyone’s scared to death, and with reason.”

The arc of the moderate campaign is long and bends toward failure. Almost everyone I interviewed for this article said that gerrymandering was the chief culprit. Every 10 years, after the federal census, both parties exploit the ability to redraw districts and virtually guarantee their side’s dominance for the decade to come. It’s the reason, for example, a Republican stronghold like Maryland’s Sixth District was able to turn bright blue in 2011 with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

The result, as Dold explained to me, is a system in which “the primary is the election.” When a party reigns in a district without question, the real contest takes place during the primary. Democrats will try to outrun one another from the ideological left; Republicans attempt to pitch themselves as the field’s most conservative choice. Candidates in both parties often end up pandering to their base’s most extreme impulses, knowing that they won’t need to temper their message in the general election.

“I don’t think people realize or fully understand the corrosive effect that 50 years of gerrymandering has had on the system,” John Tanner said. “Gerrymandering has driven people who hold elected office into the red or blue world, where their only political jeopardy is in the primary. Not only is there no incentive to work across party lines; there’s actually a disincentive.”

Tanner is among the few lawmakers who have actively worked to regulate gerrymandering. “I had a bill each of my last four terms to change it,” he said. “But I couldn’t.” Meaningful change is unlikely anytime soon. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to decide on the Maryland gerrymander’s constitutionality, sending the case back to a lower court on procedural grounds.

“This is the miserable system we’re stuck in,” Tanner concluded.

Duking it out in a primary, enduring waves of attack ads—that’s just getting to Congress. The challenges of the campaign trail are trivial compared with what moderates like Rouda and Bredesen would likely face in Washington itself.

Two of the most notable pieces of legislation in the past eight years—the Affordable Care Act and tax reform—passed the Senate without a single yea from the minority party. Kavanaugh’s confirmation process was a partisan bloodbath.

And ideological divisions within parties have become almost as fraught as cross-party relationships. A standoff between the House’s Republican leadership and the conservative Freedom Caucus is the rule, not the exception, for any legislative battle―preventing, for example, any progress on immigration reform. And as I reported last month, a group of House Democrats began pushing a measure that would make it more difficult for Nancy Pelosi to become speaker if her party takes the House—only to withdraw their petition when, at a caucus meeting a few days later, Pelosi herself showed up to address it.

Current lawmakers I spoke with expressed frustration with the gridlock. It’s an easy thing to pay lip service to. But representatives such as Tom Reed, a moderate New York Republican who watched as colleague after colleague announced his or her retirement this year—and who considered jumping ship himself—said they’re taking steps to ensure that the 116th Congress is different from past sessions.

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Reed is the co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of centrist members that aims to achieve bipartisan consensus on major policies. Reed and his fellow co-chair, Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, formalized the 48-member coalition last year. The lawmakers are required to vote together on any bill that 75 percent of the caucus supports. Reed told me that when the group was developed informally in 2010, it had nearly 100 members. When he and Gottheimer introduced the consensus rule in 2017, the roster shrank by half.

Ahead of the midterm elections, 19 of the members have pledged not to vote for any speaker candidate who does not support a series of rules changes, such as forcing committees to send bills with more than 290 co-sponsors to the floor and making it easier for members to offer amendments to bills.

The proposed reforms are designed to shift power from the House majority leadership to more of the conference—and foster comity and cooperation in the process. “Unless leadership gives me the thumbs-up, I’m not allowed to get a bill to the floor. I’m not allowed to fail,” Reed said. “That frustration is shared widely.”

The Freedom Caucus blanched at a similar set of proposed changes in 2015, when Paul Ryan was up for the speaker post. Yet Reed said that he’s already succeeded in getting potential speaker candidates, including the ultraconservative Majority Whip Steve Scalise, to promise to support his group’s reforms this year. It’s a sign, perhaps, that the moderate caucus’s power could be growing. “I don’t want to be a bomb-thrower,” Reed told me. “I just want to be a member.”

The Senate is unlikely to consider similar changes—a smaller body means that legislators wield more power individually, and aren’t as hamstrung procedurally by leadership or a particular caucus. Yet whether senators are willing to break ranks is another question entirely; as Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle demonstrated, tribal fervor courses through the upper chamber as much as in the lower one.

Ultimately, November will be a test of whether moderate candidates still have a place in the American political system. If they do, this election will also test whether those candidates can stick to their centrist ideals. Will they strive to be a member, as Reed put it, or fall prey to the short-term promises of the bomb-throwers among them? The startling number of moderates who have chosen to retire in the past two years suggests that sticking to those ideals is too hard a task today. “The tragedy is that people who are being elected as slaves to one party or the other are just not able to govern,” Tanner said. “They can either resist or shove their agenda down someone else’s throat.”

Still, Bob Dold is optimistic that moderate lawmakers can be effective in Congress. “When I ran, we focused on accomplishments, working together, and being one of the most independent, bipartisan members of Congress,” he said. He told me that he was optimistic, too, that voters would ultimately reward such efforts at the ballot box.

He then paused for a few beats, realizing that losing his reelection in 2016 reflected just the opposite.

“I guess you can look at all that and say, ‘Yeah, but where did that land you?’”

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Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.